Der heilige Dominikus in Soriano

By the 1620s the Dominicans had made this scene one of their most reproduced images. On 15 September 1530, in a poor friary at Soriano in Calabria, the sacristan Lorenzo was said to have been handed a portrait of Saint Dominic by two women who then vanished. Saint Catherine appeared afterwards to explain that they had been the Virgin and Mary Magdalene. Copies of that portrait travelled with the order across Spain and its American colonies. Zurbaran, still in his twenties, painted the handover itself, so this is a picture of a picture being delivered. He made it for the Dominican convent of San Pablo el Real in Seville. The church it hangs in went up about 70 years after the paint was dry, and since 1842 it has served as the parish of Santa Maria Magdalena.